Workplace Wisdom Blog

In order for organizations to achieve long-term employee engagement they must focus on the long-term employee experience, from the start of the employee cycle all the way through to the end. That is, from the very first time a potential employee is contacted in the recruitment initiatives, to the onboarding process, throughout their employment with the organization, and all the way through to when the employee finally does leave.

As unemployment rates steadily decline and employees take control in the marketplace, as evidenced in the recent 2017 Retention Report, it is more imperative than ever to know the real reasons why employees are leaving and declining job offers from your organization. Most likely, the reasons employees and job applicants are telling you and the assumptions that your leaders are making are not one-hundred percent accurate – or simply not true.

Employees have the power in today’s employee marketplace. Organizations must make strategic, well-informed efforts to create a workplace that is preferred in order to retain employees and maintain profits amidst the mounting risk of increased turnover costs. Unfortunately, many employee retention efforts are misguided by common myths as evidenced in the 2017 Retention Report: Trends, Reasons & Recommendations.

Exit interviews have a long-standing history of informing employers why their employees are leaving. Work Institute’s 2017 Retention Report highlighted the many elements of the work environment, management behavior, characteristics of the job and career path, etc. that caused a worker to take a job elsewhere. With this knowledge, employers can certainly build strategies for creating a desirable workplace that is competitive with alternatives their employees are probably considering.

Organizations across the U.S. have tried all kinds of strategies to keep employees engaged and retained. Yet, voluntary turnover is increasing at an alarming rate and costing businesses billions - $536 billion in 2016 alone. This reveals a big gap between the actual reasons employees leave their jobs and the actions that employers are taking to try to retain employees.

I hear company after company detail the effort and cost invested in hiring and training employees, only to have them leave within the first year on the job. Frequently, an employee will leave in the first few months, before the organization recoups any of the hiring expense or adds any value to the bottom line, making first year turnover a very expensive problem.

Voluntary employee turnover comes with a steep price tag in the US, costing businesses $536 billion in 2016 alone according to the 2017 Retention Report. If you’re experiencing sticker shock, you will wince at findings in that same report, which reveal the reasons most employees cite for leaving are preventable and that those preventable reasons for leaving are on the rise, threatening employers with a growing fee for employee turnover.

After softer than expected growth in March 2017, the April Jobs Report shows that new jobs came back with a bang. US employers added 211,000 jobs in April, which has spurred conversation among economists about whether or not the US has reached full employment, or whether or not everyone who wants to work is able to find a job.

Unlike the First Daughter, most employees aren’t willing or able to shrug off the goal of work-life balance – they leave jobs because of it. According to Work Institute’s 2017 Retention Report, Work-life Balance was the number two reason employees left their jobs in 2016, accounting for about 12% of exiting workers.

Over the past 45 years, there have been multiple empirical studies to validate how companies can gain the most reliable information from departing employees to best understand why they left their organization. These scientific studies show that two things are necessary to ensure companies obtain the most accurate information from departing employees.